Resultative

In linguistics, a resultative is either an adjectival phrase indicating the state of a noun resulting from the completion of the event denoted by the verb, or a verbal construction denoting the result state of an event. This verbal construction type of resultative is usually considered part of the field of aspect.

Adjectival resultatives
This type of resultative is a phrase that indicates the state of a noun resulting from the completion of the verb. In the English examples below, the affected noun is shown in bold and the resulting predicate is in italics:

John licked his plate clean. Mary painted the fence blue. The cold weather froze the lake solid.

Subjects of passive and unaccusative verbs may participate in resultative constructions:

Passive: The well was drained dry. Unaccusative: The door swung open.

Subjects of unergative verbs may also participate in resultative constructions, but a "dummy object", that is, an otherwise absent reflexive pronoun must be inserted:

Gordon laughed himself helpless. The child screamed itself hoarse.

Resultatives are distinct from depictive constructions, though often both a resultative and a depictive reading is possible from the same sentence. For example, in "John fried the fish dry", a resultative reading suggests that as a result of John's frying, the fish became dry. On the other hand, also possible is a depictive reading in which John is already dry, and that is the state in which he is frying the fish (because e.g. he had been back from the beach for long enough to be dry). Both depictives and resultatives are important in the understanding of small clauses because their exact properties seem to vary considerably from language to language.

Verbal resultatives[edit]
This sort of resultative is a grammatical aspect construction that indicates the result state of the event denoted by the verb. English does not have a productive resultative construction. It is widely accepted (see, for example, Bybee et al. 1994) that the beperfects of various European languages (e.g. French, Italian, German, and Dutch) began as resultative constructions. The seminal work on this type of resultative remains Nedjalkov (1988).

References[edit]

BYBEE, Joan, Revere PERKINS, and William PAGLIUCA. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. NEDJALKOV, Vladimir P. (ed.). 1988. Typology of Resultative Constructions. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. (English translation edited by Bernard Comrie.)